Embracing sexual commodification is not a path to freedom – it is instead a rigged game, a cultural con manipulating girls and women into giving men and boys free sex work, and to call doing so "empowering." Raunch culture is a cruel form of gaslighting keeping girls and women preoccupied with the male gaze. As Britney's story illustrates, pornification is simply another tool keeping girls and women under the thumb of patriarchy.

On the contrary, we live in a culture so hell-bent on de-aging women into prepubescent girls. But also so dead set on molding naive, sexless girls into sexpot pornified women.

It was not sexual, but sexual, too. Like life. It was life!

He then explained to me what a Tahitian drink should be like, could be like, and I explained to him that we don’t really notice these kinds of details. We are not concerned with presentation, and we don’t savor. The idea is to get drunk. “But why?” he asked. I shrugged. There is no real answer to that question—about anything in America—except to ask back: Why not?